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Ryan Breslow is raising up to $27M in pay-to-play bridge funding to save Bolt

Ryan Breslow, the controversial entrepreneur who returned as CEO of Bolt last year after years of legal battles and clashes with investors, refuses to give up on the checkout processing startup he co-founded in 2014.

The company, which hit an $11 billion valuation in early 2022 before plummeting 97% to $300 million, is now raising a bridge round of up to $27 million, Breslow told TechCrunch. Bridge rounds are short-term financings meant to tide a company over until its next major fundraise.

The capital is being raised from existing investors and structured as a convertible note, meaning it will turn into equity at a discount once Bolt closes a future funding round. It also includes a punitive “pay-to-play” provision, meaning backers who don’t participate will lose a large portion of their equity in the company.

In 1990, NASA recovered tomato seeds after nearly 6 years on LDEF; classroom tests found space seeds germinated at 73.8% versus 70.3% for Earth controls

If you were in a classroom in the early 1990s, there is a real chance you planted a piece of space history without even realizing it. NASA sent Rutgers tomato seeds into space for nearly six years and then gave them to 3.3 million students across the country, according to NASA’s Technical Reports Server. Years before people started talking about growing food on Mars, this quiet classroom project was already testing whether seeds could survive years of space radiation and still grow.

Why NASA left seeds in orbit for six years

The seeds were never meant to stay in space that long. The project, called the Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students, or SEEDS, was a collaboration between NASA Headquarters, NASA’s Langley Research Center, and the George W. Park Seed Company. Rutgers tomato seeds were loaded onto the Long Duration Exposure Facility, a satellite designed to see how materials and biological samples perform over periods in orbit. The Challenger disaster in January 1986 changed the timeline, grounding the shuttle program for about 32 months until it returned to flight in September 1988. The satellite stayed in space far longer than expected. When it finally returned to Earth in January 1990, the tomato seeds had been in orbit for nearly six years. They had been exposed to radiation and solar wind the entire time.

The neural basis of laughter

However, by looking at data from invasive brain monitoring—such as direct electrical stimulation used in medical treatments—researchers in this review paper have mapped out the brain’s “laughter engine.”

Not all laughter comes from pure humor. We often laugh politely at a boss’s joke, chuckle to smooth over a tense moment, or use a “polite giggle” to signal friendliness during everyday conversation.

Laughter is a universal social signal and a defining clinical sign of various neurological disorders. Yet, its neural orchestration remains elusive, due in part to the challenge of reproducing its spontaneous nature in the laboratory. In this review, we showcase how recent invasive investigations—from direct electrical stimulation to intracranial recordings—unveil the underlying circuitry. We propose a dual-system framework: an evolutionarily ancient cingulo-temporal network that acts as the gateway for spontaneous, involuntary outbursts; and a lateral motor-opercular system that co-opts speech-production networks for volitional, conversational laughter.

Why does LaSc${}_{2}$H${}_{24}$ exhibit superior superconductivity compared with LaH${}_{10}$?

Here, the authors indicate that scandium not only distorts the hydrogen cage structure but also creates MgB${}_{2}$-like Sc-H states at the Fermi level. This synergy enhances electron-phonon coupling, unifies strongly coupled H-H states with widely distributed Sc-H states on the Fermi surface, and leads to isotropic single-gap superconductivity with a higher superconductivity.

Radiological response of primary central nervous system lymphoma after corticosteroid therapy and its predictive value on overall survival: a multicenter study

Primary Large-B-Cell Lymphoma of the CNS (PCNS-LBCL) is a rare, aggressive tumor often sensitive to corticosteroid therapy (CST). This multicenter study investigated the spectrum of radiological responses to routine CST and evaluated its impact on patient prognosis.

The researchers utilized a prospective cohort of 18 patients for volumetric MRI analysis and a combined prospective-retrospective cohort of 31 patients for 2D tumor analysis. Patients received CST post-biopsy, with follow-up MRIs performed on the seventh day (median) after surgery. The study correlated radiological responses with CST dosage, LDH levels, and overall survival (OS) using Kaplan-Meier and Firth-corrected Cox regression.

In the prospective cohort, 83.3% of tumors regressed with a median regression of 40%, while 16.7% progressed despite CST resulting in a median progression of 46%. These changes were not dose-dependent, but there were indications of a correlation with LDH levels. Patients showing regression had a median OS of 31.4 months, compared to 3.9 months for tumors progressing during CST (p = 0.015). Firth-corrected Cox regression showed, despite the small sample size, that radiological response (p = 0.02) could be a promising prognostic factor in a model including age, type of therapy and Karnofsky performance status.

Did the Unabomber Predict the Singularity? Ted Kaczynski’s Warning

16, he entered Harvard. At 25, he was the youngest assistant professor Berkeley had ever hired. At 27, he walked away from all of it into a Montana cabin with no electricity and no running water.

Then he started mailing bombs.

Ted Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others. Nothing excuses that, and this is not an attempt to.

But in 1995 he traded an end to the killing for the publication of his manifesto, and there are two passages in it I have not been able to shake. Not because they are unhinged. Because of when they were written and what they describe.

I am deliberately not quoting them here. You should read them cold, with no name attached, and work out for yourself what you are looking at.

Then the uncomfortable question arrives on its own. Was the Unabomber a murderous neo-Luddite whose ideas deserve to be buried with him, or was he among the first to see the #Singularity coming and recoil at it?

My answer will not satisfy either camp.

Continue reading “Did the Unabomber Predict the Singularity? Ted Kaczynski’s Warning” | >

Shining Science (@ShiningScience) on X

Shining Science on X: 🚨 A groundbreaking MIT brain-scan study shows relying on ChatGPT weakens critical thinking and memory wiring.

A recent MIT study, titled The Cognitive Cost of Using LLMs, monitored the brain activity of 54 students using electroencephalography (EEG) devices.

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab discovered that participants who consistently relied on ChatGPT for essay-writing tasks demonstrated significantly lower neural engagement in brain regions tied to memory and analytical reasoning.

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